“Supposed to Be Dead, / Fair Argument”: Cross-Reading in the Mid-to-Late Eighteenth Century

Abstract In this paper, I chart the history of an unusual eighteenth-century reading practice: cross-reading. By reading across newspaper columns, cross- readers could fashion new sentences from existing pages of newspaper text. I begin by briefly outlining the development of newspapers in the eighteenth century to contextualize cross-readings’ engagement with the medium of the newspaper. I contend that cross-reading responded to the form and content of newspapers as well as to the confusing experience of reading them. I then explore how this reading practice accords with eighteenth-century reading habits and suggest that cross-reading epitomized eighteenth-century readers’ contributions to the texts they read. Then, I turn from the implied readers to the writers and argue that cross-readings were often specifically constructed to satirize both newspapers and politics. Finally, I address the migration of cross-readings from newspapers into comic miscellanies and jestbooks and consider how this weakened cross-readings’ creative and subversive potential.